CURATORIAL PROJECTS

أَمَلَ ਉਮੀਦ امید आशा Hope
Two Rivers Art Gallery | Prince George, British Columbia | Oct. 27 - Feb. 5, 2023

Through video, painting, sculpture and other media, this extraordinary collection of work by South Asian artists including Aman Aheer, Minahil Bukhari, Farheen Haq, Keerat Kaur, Sunroop Kaur, Sara Khan, and Mustaali Raj offers reflections on contemporary life. Members of South Asian communities are dispersed around the globe forming a complex diaspora that bridges places, traditions, nationalities, languages and faiths. While this exhibition addresses themes of strife, displacement and despair, it reverberates with a love of culture and community through which is found strength, the power to overcome adversity, and above all Hope.

Photo credit: Darrin Rigo

Curatorial Statement | Guest Curator: Sandeep Johal

Hope is ever present. How often, in a single day, do we reach towards it, willing something good to happen? Through the uncertain and, quite frankly, scary times of the last two and a half years, communities around the world have come together in the collective hope that things will get better.

This exhibition opens during the South Asian holiday of Diwali, the Festival of Lights. Diwali, draws on themes of light over dark, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance. While this exhibition is not about Diwali, the idea of hope is at the core of both.

For this exhibition, seven BC-based South Asian artists share different manifestations of hope, each rooted in individual identities and stories, connected to complex pasts and ancestral lineages, and exploring present day anxieties and fears, while simultaneously dreaming up new ways of building the future. These artworks challenge our ideas of hope and ask us to examine what hope means to each of us, individually and collectively, in these rapidly changing times.